Mathematicians Deconstruct US News College Rankings 161
An anonymous reader writes "US News makes a mint off its college rankings every year, but do they really give meaningful information? A pair of mathematicians argues that the data the magazine uses is all likely to be at least somewhat relevant, but that the way the magazine weights the different statistics is pretty arbitrary. After all, different people may have different priorities. So they developed a method to compute the rankings based on any possible set of priorities. To do it, they had to reverse-engineer some of US News's data. What they found was that some colleges come out on top pretty much regardless of the prioritization, but others move around quite a lot. And the top-ranked university can vary tremendously. Penn State, which is #48 using US News's methodology, could be the best university in the country, by other standards."
Reputation (Score:5, Insightful)
A college degree is an education, and that should be of paramount concern. It's also nice to be in a place you'd enjoy living, etc.
But then there's reputation. You might get the same education at CMU and MIT, but if you're looking for jobs, all other things being equal, someone's gonna pick the MIT grad because it'd a bigger name. I realize it's variable across fields and with individuals, but names mean something to a lot of people, particularly when they're not really qualified to judge on merits.
Re:Reputation (Score:5, Funny)
and Harvard Business School (Score:2, Informative)
And even if he weren't a member of one of the more powerful families in the US, he probably would have done pretty well for himself having those names under his belt.
Whether or not he actually learned anything of value, though, is a matter we must pass over in silence.
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Maybe he really is a genius... I think it would take someone very clever to appear that inane and yet still get elected. Twice.
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Bush is just a cowboy costume for Cheney and Rove.
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What I can't figure-out is why these colleges are treating students like millionaires. The Today Show visited a Carolina school, and the students were getting free meals, and free concierge service ("my suit needed cleaned; can you take care of that for me?" "Yes sir.")
Why are my taxdollars being used to treat these young brats like Richie Riches???
Cut the freebie junk, and let me keep those taxdollars for myself. I need them to pay my heating bills.
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Do you know exactly which schools they were because, well, it kind of makes a big difference. If they visited private schools (which is most likely), your tax dollars aren't being wasted. And I'm sure that those "Richie Rich" kids probably are paying through the nose in tuition, housing, fees (etc) which is what is covering the costs the lavish (and ludicrous) treatment.
You are not going to find a publicly funded (paid by your tax dollars) school that is that outlandish and extravagant.
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In all likelihood your "taxdollars" are not being used for that.
Their parents are likely paying through the teeth on tuition for it. Your tax dollars don't go very far when it comes to universities, and the universities tend to seriously gouge the students on tuitions, fees, "optional contributions," and fines in order to fund their projects. In return, they offer students these "perks" which cost the university very little money but make them feel better about how badly they're being dicked in the process.
Re:Reputation (Score:5, Insightful)
And he became president. That's a pretty clear success for him. :-)
That's actually pretty sad... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Not necessarily sad... (Score:2)
...a college degree should mean something, and some colleges invest considerably in the branding of their name by having a rigorous admissions standard and rigorous grading standard.
If 10 of the past 10 people hired from college X have turned out to be great employees, and 5 out of 10 from college Y have turned out to be great employees, then there's nothing irrational about having a less-rigorous interview process for people hired from the college where your experience has been 10 out of 10.
Note that PERSO
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facts?!
didn't you mean
Re:Reputation (Score:5, Informative)
George W. Bush graduated from Yale.
Until women were allowed into Yale, rich kids could get in without any uncertainty, as long as they weren't dismally stupid. When women were added to the pool (and when other policies designed to attract upper class white students were dropped in 1970), suddenly the acceptance rate had to drop massively, and the choice was made to base all admissions (or nearly all) on academics.
W would probably have been rejected if he were to apply now. His daughter might be raised as a counter-example, but she was a good student in high school. It certainly still helps to be rich and well known, but it's no longer a carte blanche. Graduating's a lot harder now than it was then, too, but that's a different story.
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Until women were allowed into Yale
What?!
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It certainly still helps to be rich and well known, but it's no longer a carte blanche.
I'm sure if his daughter didn't get in on the first try, she would on the second try - right after construction of Bush Hall was completed.
Re:Reputation (Score:4, Informative)
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Really? Yale wouldn't admit into their school a current President of the United States? Nor would they admit the son of a guy who used be President of the United States and the Director of the CIA? Also, since the uncle of George Bush Senior donated an entire wing to Yale as Bush Senior was admitted into the school, I'll suppose the next thing you'll tell me is that donating a building now to Yale would have absolutely no influence in their admissi
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George W. Bush graduated from Yale.
And has spent the rest of his life acting as if he was ashamed to have ever gone to college at all.
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As you note, reputation is just one factor and it really depends on what each student wants to *get* out of their college career. Some students are interested in the education itself. Some are interested in the diploma as a hoop to jump through. Others want to push their careers forward through the reputation of the degree (which may be different from the reputation of the school overall) and through networking. So for some people, reputation is almost irrelevant while for others, it's paramount.
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Agreed. It's worth noting, too, that after a while the reputation of your college doesn't matter so much. You may have gone to Wattsamatta U, but if you've got brains and your work is good, you typically wind up doing just fine.
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Yes, general reputation matters. Cambridge and Oxford in the UK have enormous street cred with employers and it doesn't matter if they're the best in a given field. They'll always be highly regarded. Specific reputation also matters. A university known to have brilliant students and produce top-notch wizards (Hogwarts?) in that specific field will also count highly with an employer. (It'll be the name HR becomes extremely familiar with, if HR is bothering to track such things - and top employers are more li
Re:Reputation (Score:5, Interesting)
Something very weird happens here in Mexico.
According to several international studies*, The National Automonous University of Mexico (UNAM), and the National Polytechnics Institute (IPN), the two largest public universities in the country, are the best institutions of higher learning in the country.
Yet it is very common to see "UNAM, IPN, graduates need not apply" in job listings. Why?
Because employers seem to believe that the networking and prestige of the exclusive private schools are worth more than being a graduate of the two institutions that generate 90% of the scientific research in the country!
Sources:
http://www.topuniversities.com/worlduniversityrankings/results/2007/overall_rankings/top_400_universities/ [topuniversities.com]
http://www.arwu.org/rank2008/ARWU2008_TopAmer(EN).htm [arwu.org]
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ITESM grads might beg to differ about UNAM and IPN being the best. ;)
Of course you would, you paid through the nose for that degree! ;)
I will admit that ITESM is probably one the best of the private schools for engineering, though
Re:Reputation (Score:5, Insightful)
Bzzzzt!!! Not always right.
A college degree is a piece of paper. But I'll concede that the education should be the paramount concern. I agree with a concept I read in Money magazine a few years ago when they analyzed how much a difference in salary people got depending on what school they went to and how much they spent. The gist of what they recommended was to get the basics from a community college that can transfer credits, then enroll in the more expensive places. Math is math, science is science, IT is IT up to a point. That way you don't spend two years figuring out that you suck at IT and spending a crap load of money doing it.
Not everyone puts a lot of value in a school's reputation. I'd rather work for a place that hires people based on their abilities instead of on a sheepskin. I worked with a VP of development that had a PhD in neuro-networks from MIT. Smart guy ... lousy to work with. Ego the size of Massachusetts, and the personality of a penny.
I don't even pay attention to whether someone has a degree or not when hiring admins or development staff. In fact, 'professional students' will probably fall down lower on my list than someone who has been attending local colleges taking specific courses. All I care about is how smart and curious they are, and lots of smart, curious people don't go to school. Anybody can learn to code, but the smart and curious people are really good at it. Some of the best IT people I have worked with in the last 25 years had very little college education.
You want to be a doctor or a lawyer or a consultant and have your own business?? Pay for the degree, many people put stock in it.
Aren't that smart?? Pay for the degree, it fools some people.
Otherwise, save your money. Learn what you need, go to a tech school or get a 4 year at a state school if it's that important to you.
If you are smart, curious, and have a strong work ethic, you will do fine.
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A medical student at Harvard who graduates at the top of the class is a called a doctor; a medical student at Harvard who graduates at the bottom of the class is still called a doctor.
Actually I know several people who graduated from Harvard and many of them I see are good doctors but few of them I wouldn't let them touch my car lest they kill that too.
Working with many people in the graduate and post-doctorate world where they went to school doesn't mean much to me now. It is more of a networking thing tha
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From what I've seen in the UK, many company directors seem to have a preference for graduates from the university that they went to, rather than by any other selection method. But with so many qualified people chasing the same well-paying jobs, you can't really blame them. Otherwise they start using techniques like handwriting analysis, psychometric questionnaires and pop quizzes to divine who is the "safe bet".
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If the rankings were more statistically driven instead of by the whims of "experts", these unearned reputations might start to
The rankings have always been meaningless (Score:3, Interesting)
At best, they provide a filter for individuals of a certain level of ability of competence, e.g. the average graduate from a school #1 is going to be more capable than the average graduate from school #100.
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That's OK. The ranks of college graduates (a la GREs) are also pretty meaningless, so at least there is symmetry.
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Now how do you determine whether the person in front of you is "average" for their school?
I agree that it's not completely meaningless. If all I know about two people is that one graduated from Harvard and the other from some random community college, I'm going to assume that the Harvard candidate has something more working in his favor. I won't necessarily know what he has in his favor-- whether it's that he's smart, he knows how to cheat, or he has a rich daddy who pulls strings. But it's a pretty goo
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That is complete and utter bullshit
First off, there is no 'average' college student and just because you go to a #1 school doesn't make you 'capable' of doing jack shit other than going further into debt.
I'm currently a college student (4th year, will graduate after 5 years) and when high school students ask me about college there is really only one thing I say. "Go to the school you feel most comfortable learning at, because you will learn pretty much the same damn thing no mater where you go and ultimatel
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I've never understood the deal with college rankings.
The problem is the fixation we have on getting "the best", as if there was some universal measure.
Why can't we be happy with variety and individual merits? Do some arbitrary numbers from a school really tell you much about a person you're about to employ? Do you really think the work of some research teams at a particular college that your potential employee probably had absolutely no connection to, other than being in the same school, along with thousan
This is news? (Score:3, Insightful)
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When it comes to landing a job, it's the other way around: Ranking within majors (let alone concentration within majors) is meaningless and the only thing that matters is the overall university ranking. All recruiters, headhunters, and HR departments know is the overall reputation. That's why Ivy beats everything, and might-as-well-be-ivy (MIT, Stanford, Duke, etc.) beats everything else.
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Wow, I really feel sorry for whatever company you work for. Its been my experience that within a field, people care more what schools are good in that field than what schools are good overall.
In engineering, for example, you'd expect a student from Purdue or Texas or MIT or UC-Berkley to be looked at in a much better light for their high engineering standards.
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This is not my experience graduating from a state school (Cal Poly: SLO) with a degree in Computer Engineering. The grad to job placement for that degree (and many of the other engineering degrees) is phenomenal, because the program is known as being good.
If you're applying as a business student, perhaps that's true. However, I think school prestige in engineering applies more towards grad school than to job placement.
depends heavily on the field (Score:3, Insightful)
In technical areas (e.g. engineering), reputation within the field matters a lot more than generic reputation. People at Boeing know what the good aerospace engineering places are, and hire accordingly. If you graduated from an Ivy with an unknown engineering program, you're more likely to get responses like, "huh, I didn't even know Yale had an engineering program". Meanwhile, if you graduated from a generally lesser-known school with a top-rated engineering program (e.g. Rose-Hulman or Harvey Mudd) you're
Learning is fun (Score:1)
Penn State and working out who is good or not (Score:5, Funny)
Penn State, which is #48 using US News's methodology, could be the best university in the country, by other standards.
Was that standard "name which sound most like a Prison". Its good to get some measure of how good a team is but there are of course other approaches, one would be to have a league system with a set play-off format (rather than 100 "bowl" games) with a number if tiers, bottom few teams drop down a tier, winners of the various tiers below move up.
The whole point of the US News figures is that they are arbitrary, this isn't about really working out who is best over the course of the season its about having something to talk about around the water cooler, it would be miles more boring if you know that winning a game by 4 points when someone else loses by 2 means that your ranking goes up. You'd have commentators talking all the time about the "real time change" in the figures, it would be mind-numbingly boring.
Keep the arbitrary figures lets just have a proper league system instead rather than a flat "randomly play teams" format.
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Single-elimination playoffs are arbitrary, too.
A team has a probability of winning or losing a game against any given opponent. Whether they win or lose a single game does not determine whether their probability is above or below 50%, therefore it does not determine whether they are a "better" or "worse" team.
In the end a season of league play and playoffs isn't about who is supposed to win. It's about who might overcome the odds, and who did.
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MosesJones: 1
Troll victims: 0
Classic trolling style, make one glaring error and then write a seemingly serious post based on the error. Fairly well done, MJ, I give it an 8/10.
So the best college then (Score:2, Insightful)
... is the one that comes out on top after taking an average of all the different ranking methods.
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You want to average independently weighted outputs to arrive at some meaningful answer? Shame on you. And anyway, if you took outputs of all possible (linear) weight combinations and averaged them, then you would just negate the weightings altogether.
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When will this be publically available? (Score:3, Insightful)
US News could take this, print their magazine, then offer this "service" on their site, run by ad revenue to really give the student a run for their money when applying for a college.
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Offer the service on the site as you suggested. After some time period assign weights based on what the people using the site used. Tada! Maybe then you get a list worth printing?
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Let's see...my undergrad alma mater consistently ranks in the top ten party schools. My graduate alma mater consistently ranks among the top ten football teams, and oh yeah, engineering programs. What was my most important factor in selecting them? Convenience to where I lived and worked at the time. Try to put that into an online service.
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Blindingly obvious stuff makes headlines... again (Score:3, Insightful)
If all the different criteria all gave the same result, then there would be no need to make a weighted average; you could just look at any single one. If they give different results, then of course the result will depend on how you weigh them. In fact, if a college ranks number one on any of the criteria, clearly a weighting exists to rank that college number one overall (just rate that one factor 100%...)
You don't need "a pair of mathematicians" to show that. A pair of high-school freshmen could do it.
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More obvious insight which should get me some money somehow: even if a college is ranked #1, you MIGHT get a better educational experience somewhere else!
Where's my article and money?
Re:Blindingly obvious stuff makes headlines... aga (Score:3, Insightful)
Our university didn't feature in the top 10... (Score:2, Insightful)
...so we made up our own top 10! We even made it sound more authoritative with better hand waving mathematics. Take that US News!
Only one statistic that matters. (Score:5, Funny)
Percentage female. If you are going into engineering (face it, you are) try to get in to a liberal-arts dorm.
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If they believe that mathematicians have taken up Derrida's agenda
That's Godel's incompleteness theorem, pretty much.
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No, you are around some of the smartest people... during class. Off hours, do you really want to be around a bunch of smart asses? Either you are going to be at your computer doing homework or out partying.
My school is 56% male. As far as dorms go though, the engineering dorm is about 90% male. The liberal arts dorm is only 33% male.
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Oh man, don't get me started on the Home Ec dorm!
Just as SAT is useless after you're in college (Score:4, Insightful)
Once you get your first job, where you graduated from (name recognition) is less important than the intelligence of the student and what you're really done. Don't get me wrong, you should probably consider one of the "top 20" in your field, but you're just as likely to get a good (or better) answer from people in your future industry than from a magazine. There are exceptions to the rule, of course, but unless you happen to be in one of the few snobby professions it doesn't matter. Finding a good "fit" for college is almost as important as the curriculum itself.
Now, if you're going on to do something great (and almost all of you can put your hands down - you either weren't born with the brain or the parents; I'm included in that class, too, fwiw) you should consider finding the top graduate program in your field. Not one of the top, THE top, as judged by your peers. Then school will matter, because when you get near the top, snobbery is almost everything. Your parents, your intellegence, your charisma, and your degree for the "three of four" ticket to stardom. You can need at least three and get to the top. Actually, I think you can only have three - if you get all four your competition will be jealous and cut you down like a dog.
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Actually, the "better" businesses in most fields know where the good people come from. For example, if you're in engineering (and it depends which field, obviously) you know that MIT and Berkley are flashy, but if you want guys who are sharp and ready to hit the ground running, you'll like a the likes of Georgia Tech, Cal Poly SLO, Virginia Tech, and Penn State. They're going to be the ones who "got it" in college and had some real hands on work, and are ready to settle doen and get shit done. No asking "wh
Playing the numbers (Score:5, Interesting)
Several of the metrics that U.S. News uses do seem to be arbitrarily weighted, leading to some bizarre contortions on the part of the various schools to enhance their ratings. Most of the data is self-reported by the universities, which clearly provides a powerful motivation to spin or "enhance" the numbers to one's advantage. I have no doubt that several colleges fudge the numbers to raise their rankings, leading to a lot of frustration at other schools that are playing by the rules but feel that they're being cheated in the rankings.
And some of the metrics make little sense. For example, engineering schools can raise their rankings by several places just by having one or more faculty members in the National Academy of Engineering. Yet NAE membership is essentially meaningless in terms of research and teaching, and hardly more prestigious than having faculty members who are Fellows in other established engineering societies. Yet U.S. News ignores the number of Fellows in IEEE, ASCE, ASME, etc., and focuses on NAE membership. So why the emphasis on NAE? Probably because the NAE told U.S. News that they were the most important engineering society, and U.S. News never questioned it, when in fact the NAE has almost negligible impact on higher education.
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US News has a strong incentive to jiggle the arbitrary weights each year. That way the rankings change and everyone needs to buy a new copy of the magazine. They're out there 'making' news.
I've heard that the single biggest predictor of a college's ranking in the US News rankings is the endowment size. In other words, if you knew the size of the endowments of all colleges and ranked them in money order, you'll get a high fraction of the ranking consistent with US News.
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That actually makes a great deal of sense. Large endowments are built from donations by loyal, successful, wealthy alumni who clearly believed they received a worthwhile education. Plus, big endowments can insulate a school fr
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Correlation with another measure is in no way an argument against the original measure. Net income is highly correlated to where you live, this in no way implies that net income is a bad or irrelevant economic measure.
A measure is shown to be bad if it consistently and inexplicably gives a different ranking than the natural order of what is supposed to be measuring.
Re:Playing the numbers (Score:4, Insightful)
What I want to know is why U.S. News considers itself qualified to rate colleges in the first place.
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It doesn't really matter why or if they consider themselves qualified. I could put out my own list of rankings too, if I felt like it. What's odd to me is why so many readers feel that US News is qualified to do so.
Less than useless.... (Score:2, Insightful)
The reason that they are pretty irrelevant (Score:2)
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Reinventing the wheel? (Score:2, Informative)
link to original paper (Score:5, Informative)
Stanford is pretty but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Having been to Stanford as a visiting scholar recently, I have to say I am very glad I never went there (tuition and housing orders of magnitude out of my reach or not.)
Things I take for granted on a university campus, such as being able to walk into a library, or to use public wi-fi while sipping coffee somewhere on the grounds... These things are actually difficult or impossible for a visitor to do -- even a visitor with credentials who is there on academic business! I was *amazed* at the difficulty of getting into the Green Library for instance, and my week was pretty much destroyed by the fact that if you want to use on-campus wi-fi, "you can't", simple as that.
At every turn, everything that could have been convenient for a visitor was hostile. I ended up rushing through my research and spending all my time at a coffee shop in Palo Alto (where the wi-fi was free, and nobody minds if you hang out and work.)
Thanks Stanford, you're awesome.
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This is standard reception for academic guests at many universities and it is a serious problem insofar as electronic access is important to scholarly work (which in most cases it is).
I visited NYU in the Spring and was stunned that it was impossible to get electronic access (wired or otherwise) through the university. My own university (OU) also has no mechanism to allow visitors to access its computing network.
I spent most of last summer in San Francisco and there I rediscovered the Public Library. The SF
yeah, we end up accomodating visitors ourselves (Score:2)
At unnamed university where I've spent some time, we basically keep around a wireless router to power on during visits so our visitors can get online from our lab. (It gets powered down the rest of the time to avoid getting spotted by the network police.)
Re:Stanford is pretty but... (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not positive on this, but I think that part of the reason for this is laws that basically require it. AFAIK, either the college network is classified as an "internal network" (I'm not sure what the real legalese is; I'm paraphrasing), in which case it needs to store privacy-invasive and impractically-large logs of user activity, or it is classified as an ISP, in which case it avoids these issues (and associated liability) but is required to know who is on each IP, which basically necessitates restricted access and obnoxious login pages.
I say this because I did my undergrad at a school that used to keep its wifi completely open and unencrypted (Want security? Go through a VPN.) which was in fact quite wonderful. (This worked, I suppose, because it was in an idyllic little New England town, where the locals weren't a problem.) But after I left, I continued to get a few emails from various services on campus, and one was to the effect of my previous paragraph (i.e., that they were changing wifi access to meet new federal regs that they really didn't want to bother with but had to). So if I were to go back now, I get the impression that I'd be faced with login screens and such.
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Dear Thayer Community,
I wanted to give you advance warning of changes in the works that will affect how you access Dartmouth's network. Central Computing Services (PKCS) has assured me they will make sure the changes are well announced beforehand, and this communication is an early start on this. The bottom line is that access to Dartmouth's "regular" wireless (and eventually wired) network will require user authentication.
The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), enacted in 1994, required telecommunications providers to cooperate with law enforcement agencies in wiretapping telephone calls. Online services such as e-mail were specifically exempted at this time. In March 2004 CALEA was extended to include internet services. This was driven in part by the advent of voice-over-ip (VoIP) technologies, but "private networks" were specifically exempted from this change. Since this time, Dartmouth, along with many other education institutions, has been examining what it means to be a private network. Our current network is not considered private because we allow anyone to use it, regardless of whether they are affiliated with the college in any way. However, our current network would also not allow us to comply with wiretap requests received under CALEA. After reviewing costs and privacy concerns, we decided to change our network to be a private network, while at the same time retaining an unauthenticated access to the Internet. Over the summer we will be implementing this project. We will be contracting with an outside ISP to provide this unauthenticated access. Once completed, anyone who wants to use the wired network will need to be a member of the Dartmouth community, and will need to verify their identity before they can use the network. The wireless network will present options for accessing the Internet without authenticating, or accessing Dartmouth resources by authenticating. The unauthenticated option will be available to members of the local community, visitors, guests, etc. as well as any member of the Dartmouth community who wants to connect to the Internet without authenticating themselves. We are currently testing several different options, so additional information about how the authentication process will take place, and how it will affect individual users will be available as final determinations about which method to use are made.
If you have questions or concerns, please let me know.
[Sysadmin's name]
So it sounds like they're doing the absolute best thing here that they can, given the rules: They're maintaining private network status for students, but assuming ISP status for everyone else (and continuing to give out free wifi). But I expect that such altruistic behavior is unusual for sysadmins, who would avoid the not-strictly-necessary trouble of these kinds of arrangements. (E.g., this is certainly not the way things are done
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Please see my followup post [slashdot.org] if you're interested. It quotes an email that explains both the regulations and how schools can continue to offer convenient computing services on campus while remaining compliant with them. Perhaps Stanford simply didn't bother. [On the other hand, I also just learned that East Palo Alto, right next to Stanford, has a high violent crime rate (highest in the nation in '92; it has dropped since then, but still isn't great), so if Stanford seemed to be in lockdown perhaps that e
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OK, the SFPL network engineers (or their contracted delegates) have bolloxed up the WiFi so that it flakes out nearly every five minutes but at least it's there to flake out. What else can one expect where all the real talent work for companies like Google and Cisco?
Aww, c'mon, guy. That hurts! :-) Public libraries had Wi-Fi way before Starbucks. I put Wi-Fi in my library and pointed the routers at the parking lots, for free of course. The older routers had to be reset constantly. I think things have improv
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Over here at UCB the wireless is closed also, but I can generate a 1-week "guest account" for anyone that wants it... this is what we do for an academic visitor. As for the libraries, only the big undergrad-study libraries actually require a univ. ID to enter. All of the departmental libraries are open.
And next..... (Score:3, Insightful)
Huggins and Pachter are now applying their methods to voting in elections with more than two candidates.
Elections have more than two candidates?
damn I gotta get out of the US for a while
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Elections have more than two candidates?
They would if the third parties didn't all turn out to be either special-interest groups or whackjobs kiting on the First Amendment.
PENN STATE!!! (Score:1, Funny)
Where beer is Job 1
No link to paper? (Score:5, Informative)
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woo hoo! (Score:1)
now everybody wins!
gives new meaning to "oh yea well I did attend the Harvard of the --insert region here--" :D
Rankings (Score:5, Insightful)
I've actually played with ranking data quite extensively, and usually for reasonable weighthings of the parameters the movement in position is in the order of plus/minus 5 places. Sure, Penn State would be number one if all one cared about is retention rates, but really nobody does. Instead we can define a range of reasonable weights for retention rates (say between 7% and 35% of the total weight) and test all possible combinations in that space, suddenly Penn State place goes up and down a fairly small amount.
A bigger concern is what is the value of selecting a school based on the ranking as a whole, without paying attention to the your likely area of major. Say, Yale is a great school but in CS is a non-entity. If you are positive CS is your thing, MIT, Stanford, Harvard and Princeton are far better choices.
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If you are positive CS is your thing, MIT, Stanford, Harvard and Princeton are far better choices.
Maybe you are talking about some CS other than Computer Science. Most people go to Harvard for Law, Medical, or Business degrees, that is kind of Harvard's shtick. It is not really a school that is known for a great Computer Science or Electrical Engineering curriculum.
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My understanding is that the big four schools for CS are MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and CMU. This is usually considered tier one. Though, I can't imagine the CS education one can get from Harvard or Princeton being mediocre.. perhaps they're not big research powerhouses in CS but I'd hope they know how to put a competent undergraduate curriculum together and attract some good students and faculty.
Anecdotal (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm a law student. I also attend one of the most maligned law schools in the country. Not entirely by choice.
Oh sure, I wanted to go to the University of Michigan. I wanted to go to Georgetown. I applied to a number of elite law schools, and was surprisingly accepted by most of those that I applied to. The problem was money. Law school, as you can imagine, is pretty expensive. It's typically a 3-year program that runs anywhere from $25-50k/year for tuition alone. Build in the cost of books, rent, food, etc. and you're looking at another $15-20k/year. Federal student loans aren't that generous, and the terms on the private loans make them rather detestable. While my grades were good enough to get me into those high-end schools, hey weren't good enough to make be stand out enough to get much in the way of scholarships. And since I was paying for school by myself, I had to take a look at my safety schools. So I started researching the various ranking systems and what criteria they used.
One of the major ranking indexes I looked at, for example, heavily weighted entrance requirements as well as the attrition rate. The result was that the schools who only accepted people with the best GPAs and LSAT scores ranked high. That was expected. But the attrition rate? By its rankings, if two schools accepted students with the exact same criteria, the one with fewer failures/drop-outs after the first year ranked higher. That struck me as being really odd. A more rigorous program is desirable, and will likely result in more failures. Meanwhile, the school I go to will take in very average students the first year, and has a huge failure rate; anywhere from 20-50%, depending on who you ask. The first year professors are brutal, and the whole year is designed not only to teach you, but to weed out the people who don't really want or deserve to be there. Consequently, they get hammered in almost every ranking except for "most competitive students," where it's in the top 10 in the country.
Then I started noticing some other oddball problems. That same ranking service said that the average undergraduate GPA and LSAT score were below the school's minimum requirements. At several schools, I noticed that, if they offered part-time programs, it looked like an incredibly low portion of the students were enrolled full time. Then I realized how they were figuring that out: it wasn't by graduation, it was by sampling year-to-year enrollment.
Example: Say a normal student graduates in 3 years. A part-time student graduates in 6. Over 6 years, the school graduates 60 full-time students (let's say they're spread out evenly at 6 per year) and 10 part-time students. The thing is, because of their sampling, those part-time students wind up being counted for twice as long. So at any given time in that 6-year period, you have 18 full-time students, and 10 part-time students. The sample is going to show that more than 1/3 of the student body is part-time, even though the school is graduating six times as many full-time students. It's rather misleading.
I noticed a number of other glaring issues, too. For example, prestigious schools have loads of information published, while the less prestigious schools usually have little more than a few out-of-date statistics. Self-reinforcing, no?
In the end, it felt like the ranking systems were a complete waste. They rank everything but the quality of the education. And while I don't mean to play to the cliche, because I know it's not universally true, but I actually flew around the country and visited a couple of those "elite" schools that I was accepted into. They don't let you forget how "elite" they are. At all. The snobbery was utterly overwhelming. One of them told me that their students were "the Maseratis of law school." /gag
I wound up going to the school that offered me the biggest scholarship.
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Over 6 years, the school graduates 60 full-time students (let's say they're spread out evenly at 6 per year)
Your law school is teaching you some strange maths...
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> Your law school is teaching you some strange maths...
He's probably majoring in IP and Copyright and using the new math they taught him in Damage Assessment 101.
My Experience For 40k a Year (Score:2)
Method != Methodology (Score:2)
I thought it was OK to be an anal language grinch on Slashdot!
Does it matter for grad school? (Score:2)
Many schools that are not too famous have very good departments in particular fields. The college guides focus almost exclusively on the undergraduate experience, but from my grad student point of view, undergrads are just so much background noise.
They got a paper published for this? (Score:2)
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Indeed it does [findarticles.com].
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Bollocks. There is so much talent in academia (and so few positions), that you don't need to go to a "best" school anymore to find good talent (*). A motivated student, as you say "there for a real reason", is just as well off going to a (good and well-chosen) state school as an Ivy, at least if their goal is to enter a Ph.D. program. As far as actual intellectual enrichment goes, it is possibly better in some cases.
The real benefit of the so-called "best" schools is for two groups: the mediocre researchers